“Tin Tan Tan” is a sort of overture to the book’s final story, and together these two stories illustrate one of Cisneros’ recurring themes, the two different worlds inhabited by a woman and a man—specifically, by a Chicana and the Mexican man with whom she can’t help falling in love but with whom she cannot live and still retain her independent identity and self-respect.
Flavio’s poem is utterly based on form, and what he says in it is so prescribed by tradition as to be clichéd; it purports to be a baring of his soul, but the reader recognizes that the poet either doesn’t mean a word of it, really, or is actually suffering but cannot break out of his self-constructed “romantic” persona long enough to convey any real (as opposed to phony) emotion.
Lupe, his beloved, has come to San Antonio to help her recover from another, longer-term romance with a man who threw her over for a blonde. She is very much into traditional Latino culture and cannot help falling for Flavio’s looks and masterful masculinity, but she is irritated when he points out that he really is Mexican and thus doesn’t need to rely on various trappings, costumes, and so on. He would also like her to behave like a traditional Latino woman—that is, to be submissive, demure, ladylike—and she can’t and/or won’t comply. When he leaves, she is partly devastated, partly relieved.
Like “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Eyes of Zapata,” “Bien Pretty” is told in a non-linear fashion by its narrator. Although the events of the main “story” (the love affair) are related more or less in chronological order, Lupe tells other things about herself and engages in related musings between and among these events; the effect of this narrative style is to suggest an unplanned, relatively shapeless, stream-of-consciousness exposition of both character and incident. Also as in those other two stories, the image of the woman’s gaze (especially the artist’s gaze) “possessing” the man—remaking him as her creature—appears here. Lupe, however, is less obsessed and much less bitter than Clemencia in “Never Marry a Mexican”; she seems, as the narrative ends, to be moving on with her life as an independent woman.
